CTO, Startup Experience, Hands-On Rust

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Texas.

📋 Description

• Define and guide the long-term technical architecture for OleOle’s football-centric social network and super app.

• Spearhead backend architecture and infrastructure strategy utilizing Rust-based systems.

• Assist in constructing scalable systems that support feeds, messaging, live updates, video, and data infrastructure.

• Direct the engineering trajectory across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and product systems.

• Collaborate closely with leadership on product and company strategy.

• Establish the engineering culture, hiring criteria, and technical execution methodologies.

• Work directly with engineers on architecture evaluations, tradeoffs, and implementation choices.

• Contribute to the design of future financial infrastructure, including rewards, wallets, payments, and cryptocurrency-related systems.

• Support AI-driven systems that include translation, recommendation, search, and football history infrastructure.

• Ensure scalability, reliability, performance, and security for all systems.

• Build and deploy production systems hands-on, including coding, architecture reviews, and implementation decisions.

⛳️ Requirements

• 7–15+ years of software engineering and technical leadership experience, preferably in startups or high-growth consumer technology platforms.

• Strong hands-on engineering experience with active participation in architecture, systems design, and production codebases.

• Extensive experience in building and scaling modern consumer platforms that involve real-time systems, high concurrency, and large-scale user engagement.

• Strong production experience with Rust, particularly in developing asynchronous backend systems and distributed infrastructure.

• In-depth knowledge of backend architecture, APIs, event-driven systems, databases, caching, and scalable infrastructure design.

• Experience with social feeds and microblogging systems, messaging or real-time communication platforms, TikTok-style video or media infrastructure, financial/wallet/fintech/gambling infrastructure, AI-powered consumer products, or extensive SEO/content infrastructure.

• Ability to make practical technical tradeoffs, balancing scalability, performance, speed, maintainability, and operational simplicity.

• Experience in leading and mentoring engineering teams while remaining deeply technical and hands-on.

• Comfortable functioning in fast-paced startup environments characterized by ambiguity, evolving priorities, and limited processes.

• Strong communication skills for articulating architectural decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Strong entrepreneurial judgment, ownership mentality, and focus on execution.

• Experience with Rust-based consumer platforms, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, feeds, messaging, streaming, recommendation systems, payments, cryptocurrency, wallet infrastructure, gambling systems, AI infrastructure, search, recommendation, or translation systems is highly advantageous.

• Leadership experience in startups, particularly in building products from the ground up, is a significant advantage.

• An existing network within startup, venture capital, or fundraising ecosystems is a considerable plus.

• A passion for football, sports media, or global fan communities is a strong advantage.

🏝️ Benefits

• Deferred compensation designed to transition into a normalized salary structure following funding.

• Significant equity ownership.

• Long-term token participation.

• Founding-level influence over the company and platform.

• Potential progression into a co-founder-level position.